Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices such as radio telephone handsets, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, tablet computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, video game consoles, personal multimedia players, and the like. Such video devices may implement video compression techniques, such as those described in MPEG-2, MPEG-4, or ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), in order compress video data. Video compression techniques perform spatial and temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences. New standards, such as the ITU-T H.265 standard, continue to emerge and evolve.
Many video coding standards and techniques use block-based video coding. Block-based video coding techniques divide the video data of a video frame (or portion thereof) into video blocks and then encode the video blocks using block-based compression techniques. The video blocks may be further divided into video block partitions. The video blocks (or partitions thereof) are encoded using one or more video-specific encoding techniques as well as general data compression techniques. Video encoding often includes motion estimation, motion compensation, transform coding such as discrete cosine transforms (DCT), quantization, and variable length coding. Syntax information is often signaled with encoded video data, e.g., often in a video frame header or video block header, in order to inform the decoder how to decode the video data.